“A crack in the wall, if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. Size determines an object, but scale determines art.” Robert Smithson

Cecì n’est pas un revolver

The Guerrilla Gardening phenomenon is slowly getting known and media are starting to get interested. But what is exactly the Guerrilla Gardening? It is said that is a spontaneous movement, kept on by common people who, tired of the decay of their streets, meet trying to revalue urban or suburban abandoned spaces through unauthorized gardening actions. The first group who recognized itself under this definition was born in London in 2004, thanks to Richard Reynolds.

The movement has no leader or manifesto, every group of activists is free to act in its own way and is autonomous from the others. However, there are actually some forms of “green attack” which are more common. The seed bombs, for instance, are little “bombs” made by wet soil, gritty compost and flowers’ seeds. They have been created for he first time in 1970 by the activists of Green Guerrillas in New York. A renewed form of seed bombs are the Seed Guns, a work of the artists/activists Christopher Humes and Noah Scalin, who, in 2004, gave them the shape of 9 mm gun: red clay powder, dry organic humus compost, seed mixture and water are the ingredients of this peaceful weapon.

Seed Gun wants to be a memorial for all the homicide’s victims dead in Richmond, Virginia, place of birth of the two artists. But, beside from the meaning that the artist wants to attribute to his work, what is most interesting is the perfect fusion between a gardening instrument and an artwork. The concept of weapon itself is shown from the shape and, at the same time, denied by its funcion. Soil and seeds express the slow, respectful and nonviolent nature of Guerrilla Gardening.

Watching this work, people are looking at a gun, but this gun is nothing more than natural elements: this is somehow the same that René Magritte tried to express in Cecì n’est pas un pipe, where he upsets the ordinary way of looking at the reality, telling us that what we see is not a pipe and arguing the process which ties similarity and assertion.

Seed Gun was inspired by the philosophy of the japanese radical gardener Masanobu Fukuoka, who said “The ultimate goal of farming is not growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings”. This is exactly what the Guerrilla Gardening wants to do: improving our landscape, it improves, at the same time, ourselves.

Another interesting kind of seed bombs are the Seedbom: they have a grenade shape and one more time they express through an oxymoron their peaceful nature.

Anyone can create seed bombs thanks to manuals and instructions found in the web and join the GG battle. This is an open source urban intervention and, we believe, an open source kind of art.